It’s the thought that counts!

Here are a few snapshots I took of two new cool weapons.

The Flamethrower

The Gravity Hammer

Why the price $100 price cut when American only got a $50 reduction. Well, with the Canadian dollar almost at par, it seems like an adjustment for our currency’s strength which wasn’t reflected previously. Also, with the PS3 at $549, Microsoft had to make the pricing more attractive with the new Madden game coming out soon.

Financially speaking, it’s the time to buy the XBox 360 if you were on the fence for a purchase.

However, you might want to wait to pick one up in September to have a better chance of scoring a newer version with the 65 nm chip, which should reduces the risk of a hardware failure. Microsoft recently extended their warranty for the infamous Red Ring of Death problem to 3 years from the date of purchase for this problem. Because of this, in the event of a failure, you are in good hands, but you could be XBox 360-less for a few weeks. This weekend, I was victim of the RRoD. Since I had an extended warranty at Future Shop, I was able to make a deal with the manager to purchase a new XBox 360 and be able to get a refund even if the repair take more than 30 days. I was RRoDed and I’m still gaming!

Source: XBox Fanboy

I was watching live Microsoft’s E3 2007 conference and they just announced that XBox Live Video Marketplace for the XBox 360 is going global and will be available for Canada and Europe.

It will be arriving in Canada by end of the year 2007, so Canadians will now be able to enjoy downloadable TV shows and movies, including a good selection of HDTV content. My source was right that it would arrive soon.

It seems that in their live blogging of the event, Engadget did not think it was important enough to mention this.

In any case, the announcement is made even more important by the face that Apple’s iTunes Store, which has been around for much longer than XBox Live Video Marketplace, does not yet offer downloadable TV shows and movie episodes in Canada.

EDIT 2007-07-11, 8:23 AM: Some mention in the Gamerscore Blog.

EDIT 2007-07-11, 9:13 AM: XBox 360 Fanboy made it a news story.

Microsoft recently launched the Microsoft Mediaroom Web site their just renamed IPTV  initiative. A video presentation of the service is available on the site.

Bell Canada has been known to test Microsoft’s IPTV solution for a while now. With Microsoft’s Mediaroom new Web site launch, we can pretty much confirm that Bell will offer the service.

One thing that excites me about the Mediaroom, is the possibility to use the XBox 360 as a set-top box for television and it becomes the ultimate entertainment convergence device. So, if you have both a XBox 360 and an HDTV decoder, you can say goodbye to the need for an HDTV decoder (I’m glad I rent these things).  The wife should be happy with the removal of one electronic device from the entertainment center (or, if you are like me, it makes more place for another device).

Presently, no information has been posted on Bell Canada’s about their support for Microsoft Mediaroom.  When contacted, a Bell Canada representative could only say that the launch date for this new service has not yet been determined.

I must say, I wasn’t a big Pac-Man fan in the old days. Maybe its because to be very good, you had to memorize patterns and repeat them.

It’s the same feeling I had with Q*Bert: one day, I discovered the patterns to beat the game. I stopped playing after a million or so points and left my reserve guys to die, because I did not see the point to continue. Granted, I never had the patience to memorize Pac-Man’s patterns, but you see my point. It’s more of a memory challenge than an exercise of reflexes.

Now, when Ms. Pac-Man was released, this was a game I loved. Still the same basic principle with 2 key differences (no, not the lipstick and the bow): the ghosts seemed more intelligent and the fruits were moving. To be the best at Ms. Pac-Man, you could learn some ghost grouping techniques, but it was still a challenge.

After Ms. Pac-Man, I feel the Pac-Man games went downhill from there because they didn’t keep the design as pure and as simple as these 2 originals.

Today, we were gifted (well, it’s a bit pricey) with Pac-Man Championship Edition, which stays true to the original formula, but with multiple changes that refreshes the gameplay to a new level of fun.

Basically, the changes are as follow:

• Many different mazes; Pac-Dots do not necessarily fill all the mazes.
• A time limit is introduced
• When every Pac-Dots on a side are munched a fruit appears on the opposite side of the Ghost Hideout for continuously morphing mazes
• When you eat a fruit, the other half of the mazes morphs to a new maze
• You can increase the further bonus you get by eating ghosts by eating a new Power Pellet before the effects of the previous Power Pellet cease
• 6 different game modes. See the list here.

When I first heard of the game, I wasn’t too pleased with the added time limit. I was wrong. You are still going for a high score. But, with the time limit, you cannot fool to much with the ghosts to group them together like in Ms. Pac-Man. However, when you get mazes with many Power Pellets, it might be beneficial to to group them and get higher bonus points when eating the ghosts. It’s a trade-odd between strategy and limited time.

Adding to the strategy is how one side of the maze consistently morphs once cleared and the corresponding fruit eaten. Since some mazes include more Power Pellets than others, you can clear some sides before the others to try and maximize the number of Power Pellets and ghosts you can eat in a chain for more bonus points. To reach the high score you are going for, some planning is required.

True to the classic, but with some twists, the speed and difficulty ramps up gradually and mercilessly for some frenetic endings.

To conclude, Pac-Man Championship Edition is a true sequel of the first two classics with enough changes and variety to keep you pleased for a while. If you are a Pac-Man or Ms. Pac-Man fan, it is well worth the 800 points (about 10$).

For another good review, Xbox 360 Fanboy published this great review: X3F hands-on: Pac-Man Championship Edition.

Today, while catching up on my RSS news with Google Reader, two Kotaku articles gave me the idea to share a game concept I’ve thought of.

First, I read “Canada Loves the Wii” and a commenter joked he’s waiting for a curling game. Well, curling might not be my sport of choice, but great idea! It lends itself beautifully to the Wii remote.

Then the “300 Game Ideas in 300 Days” article pointed me to a Web site by Sean Howard who’s attempting to write 300 original gameplay mechanics in 300 days. Quite an order!

I won’t write 300 game ideas, but in Sean’s ideas, there are a few about time travel that touched some of the points of a game idea I’ve had for a while.

So here it is. My time travel idea. If you are a game developer, you can take it for free. I can’t wait to play it! Keep in my though, I’ve really thought this up, so I wouldn’t mind a call! ;-).

As a warning, my post is more about game mechanics. I do not talk about gameplay or story line.

First, some context: I love European graphics novels (in French). One that is dear to me is the “Valérian: Agent spatio-temporel” series. One of my favorite story arcs centers on events based in our present time where spatio-temporal agents try to save the Earth from certain destruction. Some agents are humans from our time that work for the future and others (Valérian and his side-kick Laureline) are here today to save their future behing wiped out because of events happening today.

In my game idea, you would play a temporal agent that goes back to time to fix things. You would get a rundown from past key events in newspapers archives or video clips. Then, you would go back in the timeline of these events to try and fix the future. Of course, while in the past, you can really mess things up and break the future, so it would end your timeline and your game if you really mess things up too much. Think Back to the Future. The goal of the game would be to make the future better by changing the past by:

• - removing key people from the past to avoid them becoming to powerful
• - make sure some key people (evil beings from the future, tyrants, etc.) don’t do certain things or cause key events
• - make sure some key events happen by removing obstacles, giving new technology or information.
• - etc.

In order to do this, the game mechanic would be based on the same principles than RTS games are based on. For example, take something like Age of Empires II, Civilization III or better yet, Tropico. In Tropico, when you develop your Island, you can see each and every individual doing their everyday chores. Some work at building stuff, generating food, go to work, etc. So, for the individuals, think of The Sims where every NPC character does something based on his class and function in the world. Your future world does not need to be very large for the concept to work, since the calculations can become quite intense. Of course, the world’s game mechanic could include technological advancements (like Civilization or other RTS games), conflicts (like Age of Empires) and these would be based on each individual non player character.

With game mechanics like these, you can simulate a world. When you play a RTS game and you are quite advanced in your game, consider this the future. Consider each step you did to reach this point: this would be current timeline. Everything you did would be recorded and this would be the past events. The game I propose would start at this point (it could have more than one stage if you want: you could be saving different worlds). Thing of it of being a new character being inserted inside a simulation someone else generated. When you go in the past, you would be inserted at some point in the timeline and you would see the NPCs do their daily chores and you would be the person in this simulated world that can change things. Each NPCs daily actions would not need necessarily to be saved, since their actions could be recreated using an behavioral algorithm.

Once inserted in the past, your character’s actions would influence the world around you. If your actions change elements of the simulation in some ways, then, you might be changing the future and creating a new timeline. If you are removed from this new future, you will have troubles when getting back. Thus, the game needs to calulate an new timeline. The game, would calculate and simulate the impact your actions will have on the future. The simulation will recalculate each step leading to your future.  Now, this needs to be evaluated intelligently. To optimize things, these calculations could be made in the background, not necessarily instantly. To explain some delay, we can say that events are propagated to the future through a time wave. Basically, the behind the scenes mechanics are equivalent to the computer replaying a virtual RTS game by itself.

At some point, you could go back to the future and see (in newspapers and past videos) the impact of your actions and see if another time travel trip is needed to further fine-tune past events. This would need to be generated from the parameters of the simulated world. Evidently, for the story, some key elements could be scripted, but other could be calculated and pictures in newspapers or videos would need to be snapshots of the past taken in the virtual world at key moments. Think of movie or pictures generation (The Movies?)

That’s about it for the game mechanics for my video game idea. I did not talk about multiplayer or cooperative play, because it becomes much more complex and even duller to explain.

In any case, I think that doing a game based on these principles would be a tall order. But, I think that computing power is now getting good enough to program such a beast. However, it would still need to be fun. That’s the harder part!

I hope you enjoyed it.

Like many fellow Canadians, I am getting tired of all the announcements for Xbox Live Video Marketplace contents while we don’t have the capability to purchase or rent TV episodes or movies. The rest of the world is in the same boat, but, as we are in the same region for movies and TV shows than the USA, we would expect Microsoft to offer a video marketplace in Canada.

While browsing I stumbled on Jade’s web page on the xbox.com Web site. I was a bit taken by the way the intro is formulated:

Hi it’s Jade, your girl from the DL on all Xbox goodness Canada has to offer. Buffy, Borat and RPGs – just a few of my favourite things.

So, I decided to email an attempt at (lame) humour to show my discontent:

Hi Jade,

I just saw:

http://www.xbox.com/en-CA/community/jade/

Since you like Buffy, Borat and other things, how about telling us when Canadians will be able to purchase or rent TV and movies on the Xbox Live marketplace like our US neighbours?

Will Xbox Live have goodness to offer Canada or is it only Canada that has Xbox goodness offer (like in your intro on the site)?

Thanks,

Jerome

I was surprised to get an answer:

We are totally working on this for Canada.  We hope to have good news really soon, so more to come on this.  But know it is in the works J

Jade

It seems there’s a possibility that we’ll have some good news soon.  The story doesn’t tell how soon is soon, however. But, there’s some hope!

EDIT 2007-07-11: It has now been confirmed!

The principle is similar to the old-school Missile Command game, but descending objects have gravity and you have 2 types of bullets to deflect the objects by pushing them away. New elements are introduced to the game play as you progress.

It is a nice little game that shows that simple game play can be enough to make a fun and addictive game. The good lounge-like music also helps.